UN: Huge emis­sions cuts needed to meet Paris cli­mate goals

A dis­placed Iraqi fam­ily rides back to their home at the out­skirts of Qayara, south of Mo­sul, Iraq, yes­ter­day. A se­nior mil­i­tary com­man­der said more than 5,000 civil­ians have been evac­u­ated from newly re­taken eastern parts of the Is­lamic State group-held city of Mo­sul and taken to camps. STOCK­HOLM (AP): THE WORLD is nowhere near on track to achieve the am­bi­tious tem­per­a­ture goals adopted in the land­mark Paris Agree­ment on cli­mate change, the United Na­tions (UN) said yes­ter­day in a sober­ing re­port that warned of a hu­man tragedy un­less gov­ern­ments stepped up ef­forts to fight global warm­ing.

The UN En­vi­ron­ment Pro­gramme (UNEP) said the world needs to slash its an­nual green­house gas emis­sions by an ad­di­tional 12 bil­lion-14 bil­lion met­ric tons by 2030 to have a chance of lim­it­ing global warm­ing to 2ºC (3.6ºF). That is the tem­per­a­ture goal that coun­tries agreed to in the Paris pact, which takes ef­fect to­day after coun­tries rat­i­fied it much faster than an­tic­i­pated.

PUT­TING IT INTO PER­SPEC­TIVE

To put the chal­lenge into per­spec­tive, UNEP noted that the gap is 12 times the an­nual emis­sions of the 28-na­tion Euro­pean Union’s trans­port sec­tor, in­clud­ing avi­a­tion.

“The science shows that we need to move much faster,” said UNEP leader Erik Sol­heim. “The grow­ing num­bers of cli­mate refugees hit by hunger, poverty, ill­ness and con­flict will be a con­stant re­minder of our fail­ure to de­liver.”

The 2ºC tar­get is rel­a­tive to be­fore the in­dus­trial rev­o­lu­tion, when sci­en­tists say hu­mans started al­ter­ing the cli­mate sys­tem by re­leas­ing green­house gases into the at­mos­phere.